Implementing HubSpot

Why is it valuable to thoughtfully structure your CRM?

A thoughtfully structured and implemented sales framework and buyer’s journey produces better data – a smartly configured CRM provides valuable dimensional data to inform your approach to sales, marketing, customer support, and business strategy. This means you can understand sticking points in the buyer’s journey, better forecast future revenue, and continuously remove friction through a closed feedback loop of measurement and improvement.

Clearly articulating your sales framework can save hundreds of thousands of dollars – identifying your goals and KPIs and mapping them up front will save your organization time and money. A CRM stores the lifeblood of your company—your customer information and engagement data. It has the ability to centralize and codify your processes and improve communications between teams. It will amount to a giant investment of time and money over the life of your business. 

When do you need to start using a CRM like HubSpot?

Typically a CRM and tools are valuable once your sales team reaches 3+ (Or they’re distributed geographically) – smaller teams may be able to manage their leads, deals, and business via spreadsheets, sticky notes, and emails. That said, once you reach a certain point—or are looking to scale operations—you’re going to want data that only a CRM/platform that codifies processes and supports your teams can really produce. A CRM allows salespeople to go out, make connections, and funnel the data they create toward the business leadership team. 

By the time you want data to make better, more informed decisions.. It’s already too late. Start data collection as early as possible. – if you’ve made the decision that you want data, now is the earliest you can start to collect and analyze your data. Implement a CRM as soon as possible. The sooner you can make the justification for a CRM/platform tool—the sooner you can start putting systems in place to collect data for better decision-making. Typically investing in a CRM also helps organizations build a data-centric culture, accelerate growth and learning,  and streamlines (lowers the cost of) additional resources as the organization grows.

HubSpot isn’t just for small companies or marketing teams – in my opinion, HubSpot has become an enterprise-grade CRM and RevOps engine. HubSpot’s crafted approach to a unified and intuitive user interface makes it the ideal choice for most organizations both because companies don’t have to pay the “Salesforce Tax” (high rates) as well as making it easy to learn and adopt for all internal teams.  

How do you tell what level of HubSpot your company should be at?

Marketing Hub: 

Marketing Pro suits the needs of most growing organizations – once you’ve got a consistent and reliable content and marketing engine—there are a number of reasons organizations might be ready to get value from Marketing Enterprise, including:

• You have more than 40K marketing contacts (pricing scales better)
• Powerful deal and revenue attribution reporting tools
• Business Units (if you manage multiple companies/brands under one roof)
• Behavioral Event Triggers to really customize your marketing efforts
• Advanced permissions, more emails, removal of caps
• Predictive lead scoring
• Plenty of other Enterprise-grade features (SSO, Partitioning, Sandboxes, etc.)

Sales Hub:

Sales Pro works fine for sales teams of <5 looking for simple tools to manage and improve their sales process – the Sales Pro level is fine if you want simple automation—but the HubSpot Sales CRM value really comes in with the Enterprise package. For roughly double the cost, you get a lot more value, including: 

• Double the licenses
• Advanced permissions and a fully customizable CRM (bye-bye training wheels)
• Advanced recurring revenue and goal-setting features
• Predictive Lead Scoring & AI Tools
• Custom objects
• Powerful automation tools for sales
• Conversation intelligence and transcription tools
• Permission settings for dashboards and revenue insights to control access 

When do you need to make a bigger investment in optimizing your instance?

Invest in your CRM when you’ve reached a sales team of 5+ – it will depend on your product/service offering and sales approach—BUT—typically, when an organization reaches ~5 sales team members—it makes sense to put a RevOps and data-minded function behind that sales team to drive optimization and performance. These “SalesOps or RevOps” (CRM) activities typically include monitoring sequence and campaign performance, enriching data and leads, identifying friction points, improving reporting and forecasting tools, and implementing new technologies/strategies to drive buyer decisions and accelerate revenue growth.

Investing in your CRM is best paired with an investment in RevOps – companies that get the most out of their CRM, sales teams, and customer relationships are often those that make the dual investment in systems and RevOps. Optimizing your CRM allows you to collect numerous insights on conversions, meaningful engagements, customer lifecycle points, drop-off rates and how calls translate into opportunities. Investing in data-minded professionals and expertise to craft your CRM and strategies toward successful customer relationships makes your systems and data actionable.

What are the pros and cons of HubSpot and Salesforce?

		HubSpot					Salesforce
UI/UX			Streamlined crafted platform that’s easy to use					A bit cobbled together over the past 20+ years
Implementation			Quicker onboarding path and timeline					Slower onboarding path and timeline
Cost			30-50% lower total cost of ownership than Salesforce					30-50% higher total cost of ownership than HubSpot
Compliance			Not designed for HIPAA compliance					Supports HIPAA and PCI compliances
Integration with other solutions			Lots of 3rd party applications and interfaces have been developed on HubSpot. It’s designed to serve and the central spoke.					Salesforce has been an industry juggernaut for decades. It has many solutions already developed on the Salesforce platform.
Ease of Customization			Low-Code/No-Code development promoted					Typically requires more custom development
Breadth of Customization			HubSpot provides a complete enterprise CRM toolbox to support a variety of customization needs. It is better for organizations that are focused on enablement and providing tools. It is generally considered easier to customize and manage. But that also means—without knowledge and expertise on key business functions—it’s easy to mess up. (With great power…)					Anything is possible with enough development resources. Salesforce has proven its market dominance and value. It is great for organizations looking to enforce complex processes for large teams. It also comes with a higher price tag.

What can HubSpot do out-of-the-box (relatively easily), and what can it do if you invest more in configuration?

Areas where HubSpot is great out of the box:

• Contact/Lead management and tasks
• Deal management
• Quote and invoice creation
• Custom quote and invoice creation tool
• Payment processing
• Sales Sequences and playbooks
• Website chat 
• Meeting scheduling
• Tracked Sales Documents
• Codifying sales and marketing processes
• Dashboard and reporting engine

Areas where Hubspot offers some functionality, but you might integrate a specialist tool for advanced functionality:

• Complex meeting and routing logic
• Telephone / Power-Dialers
• Business intelligence tools for advanced reporting / temporal data collection
• Data enrichment for prospecting (5+ reps)
• Documentation and quote-to-cash
• High complexity outreach sequencing (25+ reps)

Areas where Hubspot has limited native functionality – HubSpot has built an extensive partner network and supports third-party apps as it’s focused on becoming the world’s fastest-growing central CRM platform. There are still some areas and functionalities where most companies will seek additional “plugin” apps/tools:

• Data enrichment
• Auto-dialer
• Full meeting recording for revenue insights and coaching

Who should be involved in your HubSpot build-out?

All of your customer-facing teams – absolutely sales, marketing, customer support, and leadership. In addition—finance, IT, and customer experience should all have a seat at the table. Even if sales is the only function using your CRM—a major platform project like your CRM is a catalyst for culture change, a focus on data and processes, and it starts conversations that have the power to highlight pain points and gaps—as well as drive major revenue growth and team alignment.

Have conversations about your customer lifecycles and handoffs between departments – then use that to map integrations and data architecture. This typically involves several workshops or discussions about the lifecycle with sales to gather information about marketing activities and KPIs and how they map to the buyer’s journey and sales efforts.

Who should be your HubSpot administrator?

Most sales teams of 10+ should have an in-house administrator – you’re spending millions of dollars in hard and soft costs throughout your organization to build your CRM—so you should have a function that is championing the data structure and managing change for CRM and customer ops. “Don’t let the solution you implement today become tomorrow’s problem.” Successful CRM and RevOps is a combination of people, platforms, and processes that are continuously improved to generate value.

Your HubSpot administrator can be one of many roles – a strong administrator has technical chops, commercial operations know-how, customer experience knowledge, and change management expertise. Common titles include:

• SalesOps – most of the time they’re focused on the commercial operations of the platform and the technical buildout is handled elsewhere. 
• Director of RevOps
• Director of Management Information Systems
• Head of Customer Experience
• Career HubSpot administrators and consultants – these are becoming more common as HubSpot adds complex possibilities to their platform. 

What standard and custom objects are you likely to need? How do you define each?

Standard objects 

Contacts – individuals of any sort, typically defined as having a unique email address. 

Companies – any organization that has a unique domain. 

• If you have parent-child organizations within corporate structures, the objects can have parent-child object relationships 
• Departments within the same company can either be indicated by a field and you can use lists to identify and tag contacts to their departments. Or, you can separate and segment them into different company objects like “Acme Sales,” “Acme Finance,” etc. 

Deals – HubSpot’s version of a Salesforce opportunity. Deal pipelines, automations, and stages can be customized to structure your sales process in many ways. Many companies have a variety of different sales pipelines for deals, from project-based, to MRR-type deals, to renewals. 

Deal Pipelines (Vary by company) – deal pipelines vary by company and offerings. Many B2B Tech companies will find tremendous value in using the same 3–4 pipelines—but the most important factor to consider is how you align sales functions efforts to make it easy for customers to make buying decisions (buyer’s journeys). 

We typically recommend building different deal pipelines when the needed steps to win/lose a deal vary for your sales team (or customers). Building pipelines with clear stages and activities help both team members and customers understand what the next steps are. Different pipelines that may be applicable include:

• NRR/Projects (Non-Recurring)
• MRR (Monthly Recurring)
• Upgrades
• Renewals
• By Service Type, Approach, Vertical, Platform, etc.

Example Deal Stages (Vary by Pipeline):

• Discovery 
• Solution
• Demo
• Proposal 
• Pricing & Negotiation
• Out for Signature
• Payment Pending 
• Kickoff
• Active MRR
• Expired MRR
• Closed Won
• Closed Lost

Tickets – anytime anything needs to happen with a contract, you can tie it to intake forms, manage the process and automate pieces of it with tickets. Much of this can also be done with an abstract value for the contract in a deal object, that approach will help you forecast off contracts and agreements.

Lifecycle Stages – in the world of HubSpot, contacts can be anyone: prospects, lead opportunities, customers, vendors, etc. It is a unique individual (as determined by a unique email address). Each contact will go through a number of Lifecycle Stages with your organization—and like a river—lifecycle stages flow one way. Identify your lifecycles, and use automation to manage it in your CRM

Sample Lifecycle Stages used for most B2B Tech orgs:

• Subscriber – if someone indicates they want your newsletter
• Lead – any engagement should be logged as a lead in your CRM
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – a lead qualified by Marketing, with some engagement
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) -a lead qualified by sales (oftentimes with a framework like CGP TCI BA, or BANT)
• Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)
• Opportunity – associated with any opportunity
• Customer – Signed/Paid customer (typically in onboarding)
• Live – active customer, not yet reached initial ROI
• MRR – Have graduated to Monthly Recurring Revenue
• ARR – Have graduated to Annual Recurring Revenue model
• LTV – Have hit lifetime value and/or no agreement end date in sight
• Evangelist* – Company Super fan, typically manually set
• Other* – Vendors, employees, etc. Anyone who does not follow your typical lifecycle journey.

Deal Types – these are often built as a field in the deal object, so you can mark a deal ‘upsell opportunity’ or ‘new deal’. Sometimes, these correlate to different deal pipelines if you sell different packages with different sales pipelines. 

Custom Objects

With any enterprise hub you get access to custom objects—enabling you to track virtually anything in your CRM (and tie automations/processes to it) –  they allow you to customize and create objects to track whatever you want in HubSpot. Some common examples are: 

• Agreements – any agreements or contracts that you want to be able to track and report on.
• Memberships – if you want to be able to tie multiple contacts or companies to single memberships. 
• Locations – if you have customers with multiple locations and want to manage or control how they get associated with contacts, deals, or companies. 
• Demos or labs – if you want to be able to track specific activities. 
• Anything you want easier reporting on – you can control the fields and data on a custom object, it gives you the chance to build whatever you want in a structured object-oriented CRM manner. 

How should you think about custom fields (what’s the balance between a good addition and too many)?

Change management is key – who is your CRM champion? They have to play both defensive and offensive line. Once your team is 10+, you need to strike a balance and move thoughtfully with your HubSpot administrator putting in place proper change management procedures. Don’t let your core foundations be eroded by a few bad decisions. Plenty of organizations start making decisions to “combine” the use of multiple fields or records without considering the impact on processes or the data model. Making a couple of poor decisions is often relatively harmless and unnoticeable. But even a couple have downstream impacts that start causing friction in how team members understand and manipulate data—and ultimately build future systems.

If you can achieve your goal without an additional field, do it – keep it simple. You should have someone managing your field catalog in the platform so you can have informed conversations about proposals for new objects, fields, and systems. Is there value behind it? Can it be built without impacting other areas of the platform? Maybe it’s worth building—or at least experimenting on, or maybe not.

How should you think about reporting?

Start with “Core” Sales Foundations – start with your revenue and sales cornerstones. Create centralized dashboards for your main functions where you can aggregate a variety of reports based on use case and purpose. Common examples include:

• Sales/RevOps Overview
• Sales Rep Performance
• Customers & Renewals
• Marketing Performance
• Website Performance
• Email Marketing Performance

For example, sales/RevOps Performance would help drive performance analytics (no one has to build reports from month to month, actions take care of that) measure your lead and deal pipelines, conversion rates, sales activities (performance leaderboard), and how many contacts and companies are being created in the CRM. 

Caution, failing to strategize upfront can create a mess – if you don’t spend time upfront to create data “cornerstones”, you create a giant mess of “one-off” reports and dashboards for unique requests. Ultimately, those cause communication problems and deepen departmental silos. The goal is to bring people and data together so that everyone is not only looking at similar reports and measurements (to provide unique insights) but also so that those data points align KPIs and goals between departments to drive alignment and revenue growth. 

Have a few central reporting and analytics ‘watering holes’ – get a sales overview for everyone which can monitor the overall health of sales activities and pipeline. Have win-loss ratios, sales velocity, forecasting, and breakouts for individual tasks. 

What can you do to improve the data quality?

Clearly visualize your sales process – create a “framework” map and information architecture that tracks with your sales processes and visualize what your processes look like. Lead and object processes need to be consistent and well articulated. Two-thirds of people are visual learners. Talking alone does not help these team members learn or retain information—and it doesn’t lead to recall/referral.

Adoption is the key to everything – consistency in processes and use is the key to generating meaningful data points and being able to improve your processes and approach.

Find a CRM Admin, SalesOps, or RevOps team member to help you grow – they can preside over your data capture and reporting processes, ensure consistency, and handle change management. Whether that’s an FTE, a consultant, or a strategic growth partner will depend on your company’s unique needs.

How should you think about integrations and optimization? What categories of solutions really complement HubSpot?

Track, simplify, and reduce integrations – always look to simplify and reduce to end up with fewer and cleaner integrations—especially look to cut down on databases whenever possible. Fewer databases = less cognitive load = better focus and higher value output.

Sometimes using an inferior existing tool can be better than adding a more powerful integration – excellence means prioritization and saying no—even to good things. If you can adopt an additional service from a tool or integration you already have, you might be able to get more value out of using it than adding an integration—even if the integration is a superior tool. Do what’s best to ensure data quality, adoption, and keep the cognitive load down for your team members using systems/platforms.

Common integrations include: 

• Data enrichment tools – enrich your CRM data from both a contact and company perspective with tools like Crunchbase, Clearbit, UpLead, and ZoomInfo.
• Lead injection tools – like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and tools allow you to automatically import LinkedIn info with one click. 
• Complex calendar coordination – HubSpot does a good deal of this natively, integrated tools can help with advanced logic and routing appointments to reps. 
• Complex payment processing and commission splits – integrating a tool like Stripe can help with PCI compliance and an integrated commission split tool can help handle commissions on complex product offerings or payment structures. 
• CPQ/Quote-to-Cash – HubSpot has native quote-to-cash and sign tools. But some organizations want more robust capability for Ops and Contract Teams with tools like Panda Docs. 

What are the most important pieces to get right?

Nail down your lifecycles, lead statuses, deal pipelines/stages, and meeting types – your sales framework needs to be neatly mapped, visualized, and consistently applied in order to get real value out of your CRM and data. If you build this wrong to begin with, you often won’t have the data you want when it comes time you need it. 

GTM, Targeting, Lead Scoring, Prioritization, and Disqualification – a company’s fit matrix, lead-scoring, and prioritization help them identify and focus on the most important leads. Oftentimes 80% of the results come from 20% of leads. Create processes to identify and prioritize those high-value leads and ensure your customer ops and strategies are aligned with what drives results.

Ensure that your framework and CRM are adopted – none of it matters if your team doesn’t use the tools to create data and categorize it. Some legacy salespeople like to use their Rolodex and not track info—I can appreciate that but it doesn’t lead to productivity, teamwork, and crowdsourced data enrichment. Enablement platforms and tools—like HubSpot—help all team members contribute. Every team member has strengths and weaknesses. Tools that promote transparency and track everything enable companies to look at trends and help all team members grow.

The CRM requires culture of transparency – if an organization is experiencing friction or unwillingness from team members to be “transparent”—that’s a personal or trust problem—NOT a CRM/process problem.

Distill complex processes into user-friendly steps – successful CRMs and organizations are typically incredibly complex. There is an art to abstracting complexity in macro operations and building simple, intuitive micro-operations that are easy to use and understandable for team members and prospects/customers alike 

What are the common pitfalls?

Using your CRM as a whiteboard or Kanban – if you don’t have clearly defined in-and-out requirements for each stage of pipeline and requirements to collect information at each step, you won’t be able to create consistency, get meaningful data, or segment and understand your pipeline. It’s a free for all.

Not investing in resources to analyze data and make changes – a CRM is not a “set it and forget it” endeavor. Organizations should be investing in expertise—internal or external—to help them analyze and improve processes continuously. If your organization doesn’t have “digital-first” experts who are data-minded and have a strong grasp on all customer functions—then you don’t have the right tools to build-measure-repeat-grow.

Trying to do everything “custom” – lots of organizations like to pretend that “they’re just different” when in reality—they should be following “industry best practices.” Hundreds of thousands of organizations around the world are the “beta testers” and ongoing users of “industry best practices.” Some organizations are special. But most who come up with their own unique qualification systems, acronyms, and “everything always has to be custom” processes are just creating their own problems. Whenever your gut tells you to follow a “best practice”—do just that. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Don’t build a custom software solution to achieve something a SaaS offering can already do, unless it’s central to your service or product offering and creates tremendous value.

Skipping Steps – many organizations like to skip steps or just do the “bare minimum” to get the main features of a CRM. While true that the primary features often provide the most value (80/20 rule)—not spending the resources or time or having the expertise to “build your data model once, and build it right” can have major consequences and leave you without critical data and insights.